The study corpus: Junius Henderson’s field notes
Junius Henderson was appointed the first curator of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History (CU Museum) in 1902. He kept handwritten field notebooks describing his expeditions across the Southern Rocky Mountains and elsewhere over a 26-year period. Henderson completed 13 notebooks and 1,672 pages of entries, augmented by other materials such as photographs and a locality ledger. Henderson’s notes are arranged as entries (Figure 1), which usually contain some kind of header denoting date and place. All entries are separated by a blank space, so even if header text is not strictly standardized, the beginning and end of each entry is quite clear. Although Henderson did keep a locality ledger, he did not directly or systematically reference specimens to field note entries. Thus, if there are direct links between collected specimens and field notes, they have yet to be discovered.
Henderson’s notebooks are a chronicle of the American West in transition and paint a vivid picture of a changing landscape as cities expand, wild places retreat, and horse-and-buggies give way to cars. His journal entries describe everything from mollusks in freshwater and marine systems, to the geology of the Rocky Mountains, to the more mundane aspects of fieldwork (e.g., “Train again so late as to afford ample opportunity for philosophic meditation upon the motives which inspire railroad people to advertise time which they do not expect to make except under rare circumstances,”) (Henderson 1907).
From February 2000–02, former CU Museum Director and Curator Peter Robinson transcribed all thirteen volumes of Henderson’s notes into Word documents — a herculean task given Henderson’s handwriting. In 2006, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scanned Henderson’s thirteen notebooks for a large glaciology project. Through a lengthy series of events, documented more fully in a series of blog posts ((illegible text)), the scans and transcriptions, separated from each other for several years, were reunited once we began work on this project.
The existence of both scanned images and typed transcriptions made Henderson’s notes an excellent test case for annotation and automated occurrence extraction; transcriptions could be tagged and annotated via a markup schema, and checked against scanned images of the original pages to ensure accuracy. As of this writing, only the first three notebooks have been annotated.
Methods
We documented this project using a blog as an open notebook and a means to communicate our goals, ideas, and progress. Those goals were: (a) to make Henderson’s notes easily discoverable, publicly accessible, freely reusable and sustainably preserved and, and (b) to extract taxonomic occurrences from these notes.
